Excerpt

April Cassidy was my best friend from the first day of first
grade in September of 1972, until a couple of months later, when
she failed to show up for school. During the weeks following her
disappearance, as leaf-littered lawns succumbed to snow, and
eighteen and a half minutes of White House chatter were lost into
the ether, I rubbed a pink eraser over the memory of my friend and
wiped the loose leaf clean. So clean, it took thirty-five years and
a production of Medea to unleash her. And when she
emerged, thus began my descent.

“Where are we?” Mark whispered, too loudly, as he
slipped into the seat next to mine twelve minutes after
curtain.

“Corinth,” I said.

He took off his coat and stole a peek at his BlackBerry.
“No, I meant who’s he and why’s she
yelling?”

Mark had bought us the tickets to see Medea, to get us
out of the apartment and away from the kids. Maybe, he’d
joked, we’d even hold hands. But he’d been held up late
at his office again, though we’d planned to meet for dinner
before the show.

“That’s Jason,” I whispered. “And
she’s yelling at him because she’s angry.”

“Sounds familiar,” said Mark. “What’d he
do?”

“Broke his promises.” I wrapped the wool coat
I’d draped over my chair around my shoulders. I was feeling
slightly feverish, chilled. Tess had been sick with the flu, and
I’d been up with her every night, pouring sticky, pink
cupfuls of Motrin down her throat, which she would then throw up
into my lap while I held a cold washcloth to her forehead to bring
down her temperature. I’d suggested to Mark that maybe we
should sell our tickets, postpone the date, but he’d said,
“No, let’s just go. It’ll be great. I
promise.”

“Broke which promises?” he said.

“Shh,” said the woman behind us.

I took a pen out of my purse and wrote on the back of my
program, “He promised to meet her for dinner and
didn’t.”

Mark’s smile was weary. “Very funny, Lizard.”
My name is Elizabeth, but Mark only uses it when he’s upset.
He calls me Liza in bed, Zab from another room
(“Za-ab! Have you seen my glasses?”), and
Lizzie-bean when he wants to make light of my grumblings.
“Oh, is my little Lizzie-bean lonely at night?”
he’d said recently, rubbing my cheek with the back of his
finger. “Poor Lizzie-bean.” After which I told him to
go fuck himself. After which he suggested we go see Medea
together. Just the two of us. On a date. Lizard is kind of his
catchall, covering the bases from appreciation to contrition.
“Look, I’m sorry,” he whispered, “I tried
to call, but — ”

I put my finger to my lips, not wanting to hear another excuse.
“He’s leaving her,” I scribbled, “for
another woman.”

Mark let loose a tiny laugh-grunt and grabbed hold of my hand.
Then he whispered, barely audibly, “Well at least you
can’t complain about that from me.”

True. He didn’t have a mistress, in the corporeal sense,
but he did have a mistress of a different sort. He wasn’t
having sex with her. He was poring over data in her. Writing
formulas in her. Typing emails in her. Until eleven, twelve
o’clock every night.

Like many of his former colleagues, Mark had been lured away
from the math department at CUNY when Lortex, a Texas-based
insurance firm, called and asked him to consult on their latest
project, using neural networks to fine-tune actuarial charts. The
idea, he’d explained to me, his voice all aflutter, was to
completely shatter the paradigm of risk management. Instead of
assessing risk for various groups of people, he was going to try to
figure out a way to predict the actual hour, within a plus or minus
range of seventy-two hours, of a single individual’s demise.
If it worked, we’d have the first financial cushion of our
working lives. If it didn’t, we wouldn’t be any worse
off than we were now, which is to say, like anyone making a go of
New York without funds modified by trust or
hedge, struggling to keep up with the rent.
“It’ll mean a few late nights,” he’d said,
offhandedly, “nothing major.” He estimated six months
before a working prototype could be built. Seven at the most. But
three years and several hundred late nights later, his model,
he’d recently admitted, still wasn’t correlating with
reality. “Oh really?” I’d snapped. “Well
neither is ours.”

I focused my attention back on the play. The actress playing
Medea was beginning to cloy, playing the role like a put-upon
housewife, her shoulders sloped inward, her delivery mousy. Medea
should have been strong in her fury, full of bluster and brawn. Or
at least worthy of her spotlight as a Greek hero. “I will
kill,” she kept muttering. “I will
kill.” But she didn’t seem capable of icing a
cake, much less her offspring.

“Remember you started this war of words,”
Jason was now shouting, from stage left. “As for your
complaints about this marriage, I’ll show you that in this
I’m being wise, and moderate, and very friendly to you, and
to my children.”

My mind wandered off the stage and back to our narrow
floor-through on West Eighty-fifth Street: to the vestibule
overflowing with mini-coats and solitary mittens; to Tess’s
stuffed animals flung across the parquet like bodies at Antietem;
to the forlorn ticktock of the kitchen clock once the girls had
been tucked into bed. A few days earlier, Daisy had taped a new
drawing to the refrigerator: three figures, a mother and two
daughters, with the words my famly stenciled in block letters
across the top. “You forgot the i,” I’d
said, “between the m and the l.” It
didn’t seem fair to point out the other omission. The missing
i could be easily replaced; the missing we not so
easily. I suggested, perhaps too nervously, that Daisy put the
drawing in her special box, to keep it safe from the ravages of
sticky fingers and spilled grape juice. “Don’t worry,
Mom. We can keep it out,” she’d said. “Daddy
won’t notice.”

The curtain fell. The houselights came up. I extricated my now
clammy hand from Mark’s. “You’re right,” I
whispered, “at least I don’t have to worry about you
and another woman.”

Because I’d waited for Mark outside the theater before the
play, instead of going to the bathroom as I’d needed, I spent
intermission waiting my turn to use one of the three stalls
available, watching the men move in and out of their facilities
with the efficiency of cars on an assembly line. I pictured the
inside of their bathroom, the wall of urinals like stops on a
conveyor belt, the swift zip-release-zip motion of fingers and
genitals, the hands washed and dried or perhaps not, with nary a
glance in the mirror, while on our side precious time was lost to
spreading toilet paper over seats, pulling down hose, hiking up
skirts, tugging on tampons, locating flushing mechanisms, pulling
up hose, straightening out skirts, and fidgeting with locks which
never seemed to want to close. “Can you hold this door for
me?” we’d ask each other. Or “Does anyone have
any paper? Mine’s out.” And wads of paper would pass
from stall to stall, and this one would hold that one’s door
shut, and more time would be lost, more minutes wasted.

And as I stood there in line and waited, mentally transforming
each woman in front of me into a giant uterus, giving birth to
other girls, other uteruses, telescoping out one by one from the
original like the matrioshka dolls Tess used to love to split open
and toss about the living room floor, heads rolling under couches,
torsos under chairs, which every night I carefully gathered and
reassembled, so she could scatter them once again, I thought about
all those mothers and mothers-to-be, chugging along, finding
detours around all those inconveniences and compromises that would
have to be weighed and measured and fought over and swallowed while
the men went about their business, zip-release-zip, unhampered and
unfettered, along the conveyor belts of their lives.

“You were in the bathroom this whole time?” Mark
said, with a slight tone of annoyance, as the houselights blinked
and the bodies hustled back into their seats.

“No,” I said. “I was in Stockholm. Fetching my
Nobel. Want to see it?”

“I thought we were supposed to talk.”

“Yes, that was the plan.” But now we’d have to
rush home after the play to relieve the babysitter we could ill
afford, and I’d check my email or maybe read, and Mark would
plant himself in front of his computer to surf the porn sites he
thought I didn’t know about, and I’d check on the girls
and probably pass out on the couch watching the end of Jon Stewart,
still in my clothes, and Mark would try to rouse me but fail, and
I’d awake with a start, maybe two am, maybe three, and hit
the power on the remote and stumble my way in the dark to our
bedroom, liberating breasts and limbs from straps and buttons and
saying to hell with the toothbrush, and I’d see Mark passed
out on top of the duvet, a chalk outline of himself, and I’d
slip in under the covers on my side of the bed, wishing I’d
remembered to grab a glass of water, diving into dreams about
sinking ships and quicksand sidewalks, and then the window would
lighten, the alarm would go off, another day would begin.
“Maybe we can talk next week,” I said.

On stage, Jason and the children departed to deliver the
poisoned robe and crown to Creon’s daughter. Medea paced
around the stage, finally gathering strength now, like a tropical
storm. And then, just as Medea began to slaughter her children
(tastefully, behind a scrim), just as the lamentations and wails
began to echo throughout the house, and the blood began to splatter
across the scrim, crimson Rorschach blots arousing the sleepy
unconscious, April Cassidy, wearing a pair of red shorts, burst
forth into my mind’s eye.

Come play! she was saying, or so it seemed, or so I
thought, It’s been so long. And I saw her blue lips
and heard the phantom words spoken as clearly as if they’d
been uttered by Medea’s children themselves, who were
shouting, pleading, begging to be saved: “Yea, by heaven
I adjure you; your aid is needed! Even now the toils of the sword
are closing round us . . .”

I rubbed my eyes, thinking the hallucination a trick of
exhaustion, of a flulike fever now palpably mounting and no longer
possible to ignore. But the harder I rubbed, the clearer the vision
became.

“Mark,” I said, tugging on his shirt,
“I’m having a . . . I think I’m hallucina . . .
help.” This last word was spoken feebly. My heart beat inside
my chest like a sneaker in a dryer.

Mark looked at me, genuinely concerned. “What is it,
Z?” He put his hand on my forehead. “Oh my god, Lizzie.
You’re burning up.”

I felt the theater closing in on me, the stage lights pulsing
and swirling as if the psychedelic pyrotechnics were about to kick
in. I needed a blast of January air, space to breathe, light.
“I’ve got to get out of here,” I whispered to my
neighbor, “I’m so sorry,” and I stood up and held
onto the seat in front of me for balance. Which is when, according
to my husband, the woman behind us yelled, “Jesus! Sit down
and shut up already!” and Mark’s BlackBerry went off,
and the actress playing Medea flubbed her line about feeble lust
and ruin, and I fainted, hitting my head on the armrest on the way
down.

Between Here and April
by by Deborah Copaken Kogan [5]

Genres: Fiction [10]
hardcover: 277 pages
Publisher: Algonquin Books
ISBN-10: 1565125622
ISBN-13: 9781565125629